From International Business to 20+ Mechanical Engineering Patents: How Zhiwei Bao Is Reshaping ÉLITER Packaging Machinery

Zhiwei Bao (鲍智威) is a mechanical engineer, industrial inventor, and the Owner and General Manager of ÉLITER Packaging Machinery. Holding over 20 national patents in packaging automation, his technical leadership spans cartoning machines, advanced multipack sleevers, full-servo system integration, and cross-disciplinary applications in power electronics and grid emulation.

Beyond his role as a business executive, he also serves as an international business and growth consultant for ActionPower, a publicly listed Chinese company in the power electronics sector, helping expand the company's global footprint and brand recognition by combining his interdisciplinary engineering background with digital strategy.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started leading ÉLITER Packaging Machinery?

"I actually don't come from a STEM background. My studies at the University of Vigo, University of Granada, and Zhejiang Ocean University were fundamentally in international business, and I began my career in the shipping industry, working at companies like Hapag-Lloyd and ZIM. Even so, that experience became the essential foundation on which I later built ÉLITER Packaging Machinery into an internationally recognized brand in packaging automation.

When my father, Yunlong Bao, called me back in 2021 to take over the family business — Ruian Huaneng Machinery Technology Co., Ltd., a company whose predecessor was started by my grandfather back in the 1990s with a long history in traditional machinery manufacturing — I quickly realized we were at exactly the right turning point for international growth. ÉLITER Packaging Machinery, the brand we now use internationally, was created from that moment to launch our business overseas.

The key challenge I faced was bigger than entering international markets: how does a business owner without R&D or engineering training lead a manufacturing company? My answer was to place myself directly inside the engineering process, teaching myself mechanical design fundamentals along with CAD and SolidWorks. Our goal was to combine our manufacturing legacy with cutting-edge engineering and an international, user-focused mindset.

That exchange — between my hands-on experience in international business, digital marketing, and customer success, and our engineers' technical expertise — led to what we now call our next-generation cartoners and sleevers, featuring multi-axis servo synchronization and continuous-motion mechanisms. These weren't built simply to automate packaging, but to improve user experience and regulatory compliance, which is what allowed us to enter the high-end market."

You hold over 20 national patents. How does being an inventor shape your role as general manager?

"For me, the title of General Manager is primarily operational. What sets me apart from a conventional executive is embedding a 'customer success mentality' directly into our R&D department, rather than simply building off-the-shelf machines. I don't just guide the company's growth — I bring that value into every technical and operational department.

A good example is Patent CN117022776A, which I helped develop for our Crescendo Cartoner. We set out to solve two major pain points in conventional continuous-motion cartoners: excessive footprint and complex maintenance.

Traditionally, these machines rely on mechanically complex barrel cam loaders, extending the equipment up to 10 meters in length. That consumes valuable production floor space and creates tedious changeover and maintenance processes during long production runs.

To solve this, we replaced the barrel cam system entirely with a streamlined mechanism using just two servos driving the X and Y axes. The design loads product twice per cycle in a reciprocating motion that matches the cartoner's continuous main transmission — compressing the footprint of a high-speed continuous cartoner down to just 3.6 meters.

As a General Manager with hands-on mechanical engineering experience, staying actively engaged in ÉLITER's R&D lets me align our technical developments directly with our clients' real-world problems. We aren't automating for its own sake — we're innovating to maximize their operational efficiency."

Your expertise spans packaging, power electronics, grid simulation, and digital marketing. How do these fields intersect?

"It happened almost by chance, though it feels like the natural next step, that I joined ActionPower to lead their international branding and digital growth. I took on the role because it mirrored the exact digital transformation ÉLITER Packaging Machinery had already gone through.

I don't define myself exclusively as a business executive or a mechanical engineer. I'm fundamentally an SEO engineer with full-stack development capability, backed by deep product knowledge from my R&D and business development background.

In high-tech manufacturing, these fields intersect in a specific way: turning product success into a digital asset for both growth and branding. At ÉLITER, I learned that building world-class cartoners and sleevers with complex kinematics isn't enough — you also have to build the digital infrastructure that conveys the value of the company and product to its audience.

When I looked at ActionPower, a publicly listed leader in power electronics, I saw world-class engineering in grid emulation, RLC impedance modeling, and IEEE/IEC testing — but a gap in how that technical strength was translated for the international web. To me, this is about product marketing, not the traditional SEO approach of optimizing keywords, rankings, or traffic.

My role is to fix that. I apply the same technical SEO frameworks, structured data methodologies, and full-stack development that drove ÉLITER's global success, and deploy them in the power electronics sector. In B2B manufacturing, digital marketing isn't about running ads or chasing keywords — it's about engineering your digital presence with the same precision you'd use to engineer a multi-axis servo drive or a programmable power supply, with customer success in mind. That's the true intersection of my work."

What's the biggest challenge in the secondary packaging industry today, and how is ÉLITER solving it?

"The most pressing challenge in secondary packaging today is the clash between SKU proliferation and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).

In sectors like ready meals, dairy, and FMCG, consumer demand is shifting rapidly, forcing manufacturers to run a huge variety of packaging formats, sizes, and multipacks on the same production line. Traditionally, that flexibility meant relying on mechanically complex machines requiring hours of tedious, tool-heavy changeovers by skilled technicians — and every minute spent adjusting cams and belts is a minute of lost production, which erodes OEE.

At ÉLITER, we're solving this by shifting from mechanical complexity to intelligent, full-servo automation. Instead of rigid mechanical linkages, we build our cartoning and wrap-around sleeving machines around multi-axis servo drives and recipe-based changeover programs. Format changeovers that used to take hours can now be executed through digital recipe management and tool-less adjustments in about ten minutes.

We're not just selling a piece of iron — we're delivering a future-proof, end-of-line solution that gives manufacturers ultimate flexibility without compromising OEE. That's the true value ÉLITER brings to the global market."

Where can our readers follow your work?

"The best place to follow my engineering research, technical guides, and industry insights is through my official author profile: Zhiwei Bao.

If you'd like to explore how we're redefining secondary packaging automation with full-servo technology and continuous-motion kinematics, visit our official website at ÉLITER Packaging Machinery. I also share my thoughts on LinkedIn — feel free to search for my name and connect."